The Internet of Anything: A Smartphone App That Lets You Control Your Office Environment

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The Internet of Anything: A Smartphone App That Lets You Control Your Office Environment

Professor Vivian Loftness.

Carnegie Mellon University

Those motion sensors that automatically turn on the lights when you walk into a corporate office? Vivian Loftness doesn't like them. And she's doesn't like those thermostats that only answer to some computer sitting on the other side of the internet.

"The trend is to take control away from users, because the thought is that users mess things up," says Loftness, a professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University who explores the modern office through the university's Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace project. "We don't like this. We want to reverse that trend."

Loftness and her fellow researchers have built a mobile app designed to give office workers more control over their environments—without sacrificing what comes from automated tools. Known as IDO—short for Intelligent Dashboard for Occupants—it provides a way for office employees to take hold of automated building systems and actively oversee things like lighting and temperature from their smartphones. It's part of a collection of workplace technologies the project will sell to both businesses and government agencies in the coming months.

Today, office buildings waste an enormous amount of energy heating empty conference rooms, pumping air conditioning into the halls on weekends, and shining light onto desks no one is using. That's why so many companies are offering building automation systems – such as Siemens Apogee, Automated Logic Webctrl, and Johnson Control Metasys—promising to help building managers cut waste by automatically managing things like lighting, heating, and cooling. This is mostly a good thing. Buildings account for about 40 percent of all energy use in the United States, according to a Department of Energy report, so the potential savings are enormous.

The CMU building, the top floor of which houses the "Intelligent Workplace".

Carnegie Mellon University

But Loftness says that automation has also led to more complexity, leaving the occupants of all these offices disempowered and uncomfortable. Each building system has its own, rather complex interface—which isn't necessarily available to those who work in the buildings—making it harder to really control what's going on. "You need an expert to look at it, let alone change anything," she says. "It's like a car with too much electronics."

She and her Intelligent Workplace team aim to fix this by combining data from multiple building automation systems into a single dashboard, and providing tools that let you tweak and override the automation rules laid down by these systems. The team has created two dashboard apps for building managers—one called for organizations with multiple different buildings, and one for individual buildings—as well as the app for workers.

With building managers, the team aims to simplify the process of managing multiple automation systems and pulling information from them. Then, with the worker app, it wants to give individuals the ability to override certain automation settings. With their smartphones, workers could, say, turn the temperature down or up in an office or conference room, or switch off the lights in a conference room they're not using.

Vivian Loftness, Bertrand Lasternas, Azizan Aziz at the Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, which houses the CMU School of Architecture.

Carnegie Mellon University

The Carnegie Mellon team's solution can tap into any building management system that uses common standards, including those from Siemens and Johnson control. The dashboards are based on OSIsoft's PI database system, which lets them capture multiple streams of data and compile them into a single source, and Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning service, which lets them do complex analysis of the gathered data. This provides a way for managers and workers to create their own automation tools.

Much like the home automation tools from Nest—a company now owned by Google—the system could calculate how long it will take to warm up a room based on the outside temperature, and that means it can start raising the temperature before workers arrive in the morning. The team is also tuning the app so it can predict equipment failures, establishing how much energy a piece of equipment typically uses and alerting building managers if it starts behaving erratically.

A pilot test of the system at PNC Bank conducted by web-connected energy meter maker Plugwise found that PNC employees who used IDO to manage their energy used 38 percent less electricity overall than employees who didn't have access to tools to control their energy usage. So, more control doesn't necessarily mean less efficiency.